Faerie Blood (31 page)

A dreamy, drowsy voice I didn’t recognize as my own slipped out of my mouth. “Yeah…”

“Would you like to float forever, Kendis?”

The words poured liquidly through my hearing, joining the current that bore me. That last word in particular twined around me; it was significant for some reason that I could not recall. I struggled for the memory, but the word set me spinning through the current, Kendis, Kendis, Kendis, till my head swayed in a slow, dizzy attempt to keep my eyes upon the One. He’d asked me something. I had to answer.

“Uh-huh,” I said giddily.

He smiled. It wasn’t a big smile, but it warmed his eyes until the current that carried me along glowed silver with the light of his gaze. I sank into the silver and felt it flow all over my skin, wrapping my mind in a cocoon that sheltered me from everything else in existence. Something white and shining flickered again within me, but the silver caught and held it, and wove it into the cocoon as well.

It seemed right, because I floated higher.

“You must do something for me if you want to keep floating, Kendis,” the One murmured. His voice rang through each strand of the cocoon around my thoughts and made it stronger. “Will you do it?”

“Okay,” I murmured back. Whatever it was, I would do it happily.

“Brave child,” the voice within the silver crooned. Somewhere outside the cocoon I felt a hand, the hand that went with the voice, cup my cheek. “Noble child, despite the mortal blood in your veins. I will be calling a being to us, Kendis, with the power I have gathered from the storms I have set over this city. And this being needs something from you. It needs your blood so that new Sidhe lives may be born into the world. As the reward for your sacrifice, you may float forever. Won’t you like that, my dear?”

My blood? I didn’t need that, did I, floating within the silver cocoon?

Someone standing behind the One moved, making me remember he was there. He had black hair and blue eyes, and he looked like Elvis Presley. That made me want to giggle; what was Elvis doing there? Was he floating, too? “Are you certain,” he asked, “that the sacrifices will count as willing if one of them has been thralled and the other is unconscious?”

The voice within the silver chuckled darkly, and the darkness pulled the silver all the closer around my thoughts. “All that is required is that consent be given. And I believe our changeling is now prepared to give us her consent.”

“Malandor, Miss Thompson will give us her consent if we ask her to strip naked, paint herself blue, and fling herself off the top of the Space Needle. She’s
thralled
.”

“Given that neither the changeling nor the Warder will have time to inform the demon of this before she deprives them of their heads, Unseelie, I doubt that there will be a problem.”

Oh good. I didn’t want there to be a problem.

The Other frowned, though. He didn’t seem to like the One, and that made me almost want to frown too, except that for some reason I couldn’t remember how to make my face do it. But it didn’t seem important anyway, not even when he insisted, “If the sacrifices aren’t genuinely willing, you fool, the ritual will be tainted! Do you
want
Azganaroth to go berserk?”

“Fortunately, the decision is not yours to make.” The One smiled again, more broadly this time, and the strands that cocooned my thoughts resonated in sympathy with that smile. “The tomes I have consulted say that Azganaroth requires blood willingly spilled—or else a sacrifice so bountiful that it negates all else. Her province is blood and life and birth, after all, and with the blood of three lives I daresay she will be appeased enough to bring births back to my House.”

The black-haired One who looked like Elvis spat in fury, “Three?” A sword blurred into his hand, and I watched it in fascination. It shone cold, clear, and silver in his grasp, the silver all that was needed to attract my dazzled eye. He had part of the silver; why was he angry? “What treachery are you pulling, Malan—”

Smoothly and fluidly, the voice of the One cut across the Other’s protests.

“Tarrant. Melisanda. Kill him.”

“Are you oathbreakers now as well as kinslayers?” the Other screamed as the golden-haired warrior who served the One closed in with her own blade of silver. “Is it not enough to break the ancient Pact with the Warders? My entire Court will have your heads!”

“Those mortal pretenders to our power do not concern me, Elessir a’Natharion. As for your Court…” My One chuckled again. “I do not believe they will be very eager to avenge one who has plotted against his own Queen.”

“Lady damn you! You swore you would help me take Luciriel down!”

“Have your centuries of life not yet taught you, Unseelie, that there are no oaths between your Court and mine?”

Silver clashed with silver, sword against sword, swift and lethal against the gleam of the column where an amber-haired shadow hurled forth his own small blade of silver. It struck the black-haired Other whose voice pealed with song and wrath, making him stumble, making him fall. But the One smiled at me kindly, so I didn’t fear. Instead I watched him rise and lift his hands up above me with a mesmerizing grace; though I could not move, it was as if I bobbed upward through the air in the wake of his agile fingers.

“Watch now, Kendis, and I will call the one who will help you float forever.”

Just overhead his hands moved in intricate patterns from which I couldn’t look away… and I didn’t want to. I desired nothing more than to watch in wonder as sparks of silver began to illumine each gesture, filling my vision with light. Then came the words, intoned quietly, at first, in a language I didn’t know and yet found strangely and pleasingly familiar. It would be as though the current carried me back to a beloved place I hadn’t seen in far too long. The words grew in volume and timbre, their measured cadence that of the most somber of songs. That was good, too. I liked music.

I thought about humming along, or smiling, and then realized I couldn’t remember how to do either. But that didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered more than watching the One raise his power and call the one who would make me float forever.

I watched.

And I floated.

“Azganaroth the Foremother
, ancient progenitor, guardian of the gate of life’s beginning through which all souls to be reborn must pass, hear now the plea of your humble supplicant. Accept the blood of these lives in sacrifice, to reopen the gate for those wrongly denied incarnation.”

I was a living bell, and those words were the hammers that struck my brain, bone, and blood. With each syllable, my entire being tolled in summons; I fancied myself held aloft by the current that bore my thoughts, my feet swinging back and forth, back and forth, back and forth as I rang. White-hot light exploded from the gesturing hands above me, shooting out and down to wreathe me in a new and visible layer of cocoon to go with the unseen one spun around my mind.

“Great Azganaroth, accept the blood of this Unseelie, this child of night, wind, and frost, this son of the Court of Chaos.”

The shining circle around me briefly parted, making space for hands to throw a limp form with disordered black hair across my legs. As he fell I glimpsed his closed eyes, pain-twisted face, and a small blade of silver thrust into his flesh, high upon his back. But I didn’t feel the impact of his body against me, and I didn’t turn my attention to him. My sight belonged to the One who stood before me and called—

What was his name?

I couldn’t remember, but I didn’t need to.

“Accept the blood of this Warder, mighty Azganaroth, this son of chieftains and protectors, through whom you may feast on the energy of life.”

Warder? What was a Warder?

When I tried to remember that, something infiltrated my cocoon of light and heat and silver. I felt it between my shoulder blades, a green-golden coolness that whispered of a refuge from the rain beneath a willow tree’s branches. I heard it somewhere in the back of my mind, a run of barely audible notes, a measure or two of a song composed in a dream. It jangled against the call pealing through me, making me whimper and try to block it out. I didn’t like the dissonance. It distracted me from the summoning. I did not want to be distracted; I wanted to float, and be a bell.

But I couldn’t remember how to move, and so I tried to shoo the distraction off another way: I flailed at it with a silver-wrapped tendril of thought, to try to push it back out of the cocoon where it belonged. But as I did, the green-golden coolness latched onto that tendril and
pulled
.

“Accept the blood of this changeling, eternal Azganaroth, this daughter of mortal and immortal, child of the one whose will shut the gate against the souls unborn. Let that gate now reopen. Let this changeling’s blood be the key.”

Most of my consciousness, floating within the radiance that surrounded me, resounded with the power woven into that invocation. But that coolness was back there, pulling, prodding, like the end of a poker seeking out the last few embers in an almost-dead hearth. And it found one. A tiny white spark separated itself from the silver that bound my thoughts, growing a little brighter and a little more distinct with each insistent nudge.

All at once I realized that spark was
me
.

But who was I?

Kendis Marie Thompson
, the One’s silver voice whispered, compelling me to float forever, mindless…

Kendie baby
, crooned someone else. Older, with wise, kind eyes…

My dear Miss Thompson
from someone… wait. The person who’d fallen before me, in fact. The one with black hair and pointed ears. He had called me that, hadn’t he?

Babe
and
chica
and
Ken
all in rapid succession from someone with a lively, round-cheeked face.
Kiddo
from someone big and brawny that I loved like a brother…

A voice I knew only from a dream murmured tenderly over me,
Kendeshel
…

And someone else looking down at me with warm green-golden eyes, smiling as he called me
Kenna-lass
in a rich, rough voice brightened by the lilt of an eastward island.

Names and nicknames winked on and off like fireflies within my mind, slowly but steadily gaining strength from the pull of that cool, clean touch of green and gold. They broke loose from the current, uniting into a greater and truer sense of me than any single name could contain, as a full symphony is a greater music than any single instrument’s contribution. The One who stood before me made a final gesture that tore open a hole in the blinding light; as he did, the joining of names caught fire and lit up my brain in a flash of jagged, unsteady comprehension.

I was Kendis. And Christopher was trying to wake me up.

Much of me rebelled, still lured by the thrall lain over me, struggling to return to its embrace. The rent in the air spread wider and wider until it claimed almost all of the space within the circle of light; through it, a massive, dark figure took shape. My struggle grew harder. That back corner of my brain where I’d regained my name was a determined little hook trying to pull me free from the silver current, but that current was strong. It flowed inexorably towards that dark figure, carrying most of my awareness with it on the promise of endless floating bliss.

Six and a half—no, seven feet high, the shadow stepped out onto the rain-sodden earth. She—for the two pairs of breasts each as big as my entire head and the curves of a gigantic form the color of rich, fertile soil proclaimed the entity unmistakably female—towered over me, over Christopher at my back, and over the Sidhe who surrounded us as well as the one who lay sprawled over my knees. She smelled of soil as well, of new green growing things poking up out of the earth, of blood shed by creatures giving birth, and of the sulfur of a newly risen volcano. With two pairs of eyes like a line of miniature suns across her face, she surveyed us. Then her attention locked onto Malandor.

And she roared, a blast of thunder that simultaneously hurled two sounds across my ears: the deep rumble of boulders crashing against one another far below the surface of the earth, and the high scream of metal piercing metal. Within them came a voice, so many octaves below the normal pitch of speech that I should not have been able to hear it, but which reverberated with deafening force across my mind.

YOUR SUMMONS DOES NOT AMUSE ME, LITTLE SIDHE.

The thrall burned away from me and left my brain wide open for a flood of bone-deep horror—and returning coherence.

Sidhe
.
My uncle
.
Malandor
—

He’s going to feed us to that thing
—

Oh God oh God oh shit
—

Christopher
!

The moment I seized upon his name I heard him muttering behind me in a voice that rasped like a sword whipping free of its sheath. Gaelic syllables and then English ones shot across my hearing, and in a rush of shock and relief, I recognized them. They were the words he’d uttered beneath the willow in my backyard, in his private oath to the city that called to his blood.

“I am Christopher MacSimidh and I will Ward this city with my breath, bone, and blood!”

When he called, Seattle answered him.

Magic erupted from deep within the sodden ground, with Christopher as its conduit and heart—and I, with my body pressed so close against his by the silver chains and my blood so keenly attuned to his, took the blast of it right along with him. Every one of my senses reacted at once. Images, scents, and sounds deluged me, and for an instant, I was no longer just in Sand Point Magnuson Park; I was everywhere in Seattle. I tasted a salt-laden breeze blowing off Puget Sound, heard the clang of the Hammering Man in front of the Art Museum downtown, and saw the boats bobbing in their moorings all along the shores of Lake Union. I was in Jude’s apartment, in Christopher’s cramped little rented room, in Millicent’s house and Aggie’s and mine, and hundreds upon thousands of others. My chest reverberated with the rhythm of hundreds upon thousands of heartbeats. My blood sang a thundering chord. Even in the midst of my terror, with that harmony roaring through me, I felt miraculously, gloriously alive.